Privacy Policies
I’ll start out this section by stating that privacy policies are tricky documents. Most people who post them on their sites often don’t understand their purpose or even the document. They often steal the policy from another site and call it their own. For those of you that may not know, a privacy policy is a document posted on your site that details the policy and structure your company follows when dealing with information that is submitted to you by your customers or visitors of your site. To draft one of these documents it is not required that you have any legal assistance. However, it is recommended that you take your time and draft a policy that you, and your company, can follow.
One of the pitfalls is that a privacy policy is viewed by the Federal Trade Commission as a factual representation of the company’s standards and processes. If a privacy policy is proven to be inaccurate, it can be challenged as unfair and deceptive advertising, in the same way an advertisement can be challenged. 6
The problems are doubled for the hosting provider – if a provider has policies that are imprecise or inaccurate, they run the risk that the provider is liable for the actions of their subscribers. 6